Quip Brings The Delivery Box Experience To Teeth-Brushing

The four brushed metal options for the Quip electric toothbrush. (Credit: Quip.)

There's a reason why parents have to bug kids to brush their teeth twice a day: because tooth-brushing isn't very fun. That's where electric toothbrushes come in--they don't have any proven medical benefits over a regular toothbrush, but the novelty factor itself can get people brushing more, and brushing more is exactly what most people need to do.

It's this need for people to follow basic oral hygiene habits that electric toothbrush-maker Quip says it's trying to tap. The Quip toothbrush has a simple, elegant design with minimal features. There aren't any complicated patterns for the bristles on the brush head, or 12 different options for vibration patterns and timers. Instead, there's a plain toothbrush head that vibrates in a single pattern, and a two-minute timer that buzzes three different times to get you to switch the area of your mouth you're brushing. For the industrial-design obsessed, it comes in four different colors of brushed metal starting at $40. For bargain-hunters, it comes in less expensive blue or green plastic starting at $25.

The idea for Quip came about when now-founder Simon Enever went for a simple dentist visit. As a UK citizen, he typically had taken care of his dentist visits whenever he happened to be back in his home country. But in 2012, he just wasn't able to pull it off, and wound up seeing a dentist in New York City instead. "At the end of the visit, the dentist went on this big long rant about how people have ideas about brushing that are all wrong," Enever says. "That people think they need to brush harder, when actually they need to brush longer and with better technique. And it just seemed obvious this was an area in need of good design."

Enever, a professional design consultant, teamed up with with co-founder Bill May and the two spent 2013 working evenings and weekends on the concept for Quip. In May 2014, they finalized angel funding from Kal Vepuri, also an investor in ClassPass, Harry's and Warby Parker. Quip started shipping the first version of its toothbrush in February 2015, and Enever forecasts Quip will top 100,000 in sales in the
next several months. After subsisting on angel investing and sales so far, it will also launch a venture funding round in June.

As a consumer-focused company, Quip operates on a kind of cult of cool. Its brushed metal electric toothbrushes are
Apple-esque, and its subscription options provide a pampered feel. Depending on what you want, you can sign up to get regular shipments of toothpaste and/or brush head replacements every three months. It's like Dollar Shave Club or StitchFix in that it takes some of the hassle out of planning your purchases. You don't have to do anything, because what you need comes right to your mailbox at regular intervals. It's hard not to feel like you're in a special, elite little club when your Quip toothbrush arrives, and it's exactly this desire to feel like a part of the well-designed future that Quip is monetizing.

Apart from the cool factor, Quip also presents savings over other electric toothbrushes (though it doesn't over regular-old manual brushes). At its cheapest, the plastic version of Quip costs $25, though that plan then requires $10 refills for toothpaste and new brush heads ever three months. Your average off-the-shelf electric toothbrush starts at $50 and can cost well over $100 or $200, plus the cost of replacing brush heads over time. On the other hand, the cost of the average manual toothbrush should start at just $1 at your local drugstore.

Dental experts are unconvinced that any electric toothbrush--Quip or otherwise--is necessary for good dental health. "What we know works for everybody is that you should brush brush twice a day, floss once a day, eat a healthy diet and see your dentist regularly," says Dr. Matthew Messina, spokesperson for the American Dental Association. "People don’t have to buy a mechanical toothbrush to be healthy." Enever himself admits there may be nothing special about using Quip. "Electric toothbrushes just give you a placebo effect, and get you to brush more," he says.

But if Quip does ride the coattails of the placebo effect, that's not necessarily a bad thing. In one famous 1975 study, researchers Thomas Karlowski and Thomas Chalmers found that there were no intrinsic health benefits of taking Vitamin C--but there were benefits to thinking you were taking Vitamin C. People who received a placebo but who were told they were getting Vitamin C had stronger immune systems, and people who were receiving real Vitamin C but were told otherwise had fewer physiological benefits.

I suspect that any oral hygiene benefits from Quip are much the same: it's the toothbrush equivalent of a Jedi mind trick. The brush itself isn't a big improvement over other toothbrushes already on the market, but because it makes brushing your teeth slightly less miserable, you're more likely to brush the recommended amount. Dentists have been trying to get people to have better at-home oral hygiene for decades, and Quip could be successful in doing just that.

Next up: a gadget that gets you to eat your vegetables, too.

(Credit: Quip.)

I’m a producer on the Forbes technology channel, where I write about digital media and video streaming, among other things. I’m a graduate of the Berkeley J-School and also hold an undergraduate degree in the Humanities and Japanese from Washington University in St. Louis. M...